Time for Fury

Just like in my post about the new Arms tree, I need to stipulate that I am not in the beta and I have not actually played with any of these talents. I have simply read about them and drawn my conclusions. I could be completely wrong and there might be something in-game that makes a talent better or worse than I describe.

Blood Craze got buffed from 3% regen at max rank to 6%. Not a huge deal, but pretty nice.

Enrage got nerfed from 25% damage increase to only 15%. This is a big one. Warriors in PVP have a unique playstyle that you just don’t get in other classes. Many classes have some kind of healing ability and all class have some way to escape – they can vanish, go immune, or use a long duration CC and run away. A warrior can do none of those things. The warrior is in the fight until someone dies. And Enrage is a perfect embodiment of that idea. When the warrior is being attacked and is under pressure, he doesn’t run away, he hits back. Hard. So, right from the start I don’t like this nerf for philosophical reasons. But as far as practicality, this really doesn’t affect PVE at all. The problem for PVP warriors that want to go Arms is that Blizzard didn’t nerf Enrage hard enough. It is still good enough that you will want to spend 20 points in Fury and therefore give up on going deep Arms. But I suppose that is irrelevant because as I will talk about further down, Arms warriors are going to be extinct.

Death Wish got nerfed and no longer grants fear immunity. This is a bummer. The reduced cooldown on Berserker Rage through the Intensify Rage talent makes it bearable though. Death Wish is still an awesome talent.

Intensify Rage (3 ranks) – Reduces the cooldown of Bloodrage, Berserker Rage, Recklessness and Death Wish by 11%. This is a nice new talent. Warriors will still be relatively un-fearable in PVP because of the reduced Berserker Rage cooldown and being able to access the burst DPS of Death Wish and Recklessness more often is quite nice as well.

Bloodthirst is getting a buff that appears to be nice but is actually kind of meaningless. The current version of Bloodthirst heals you for a whopping 30 HP on each of your next 5 successful melee attacks. The WotLK version will heal you for 1.5% of your max HP instead of 30. This reminds of the itemization problems that casters were all complaining about a few patches ago – melee gear from high end raids was all about increasing AP, armor pen and crit, all of which was a direct DPS increase but caster gear from those same raids was all increasing spirit and mp5 and intellect which increased longevity and not necessarily DPS. Nobody uses Bloodthirst for healing and nobody wants to use Bloodthirst for healing, it is used for damage so if Blizzard wants to buff it, they need to increase the damage. I don’t think anybody is going to say ‘no’ to the extra healing, but I can’t bring myself to think of this as a buff.

Furious Attacks (2 ranks) – Your normal melee attacks have a 50% chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 25%, this can stack 2 times. Blizzard gave Fury warriors Mortal Strike. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. It seems to me that this talent makes Arms warriors obsolete. Fury warriors can dual wield 2 handers, they have Mortal Strike, they have Death Wish, they have Enrage, they have Piercing Howl, they have Flurry… they have everything that you could possibly want for both PVP and PVE. Fury warriors will put out more damage than Arms warriors, and with 2 2-handers the damage will come in big bursts and now they will have a Mortal Strike THAT IS APPLIED AUTOMATICALLY AND COSTS NO RAGE. The Arms warrior is dead.

Heroic Leap – Leap through the air and slam down on all enemies within 5 yards dealing 50% weapon damage and stunning them. This used to be a laughably bad talent when it had a knockback instead of a stun. It will be nice in PVE for trash, but trash is… uh… trash. In PVP it looks like it will be a very nice addition to the caster lock-down chain of pummel/intercept/fear. With the removal of mace stuns, its nice to see that warriors are getting a controllable stun instead. This is no longer the top-tier talent of the Fury tree.

Rampage is totally different. The new version no longer includes an AP increase, instead, when you score a crit, the entire party or raid gets an additional 5% melee crit. That sounds great, but (correct me if I am wrong) Leader of the Pack is also raidwide and it doesn’t stack with Rampage. Since you almost always have a feral druid somewhere in your raid, this talent is becomes quite dumb.

Bloodsurge (3 ranks) – Bloodthirst crits have a 33% chance to make your next Slam instant cast. I honestly can’t decide if this is good or not. Does instant Slam reset your swing timer like regular Slam? How does the swing timer even work when you are dual wielding? Does slam reset the main hand swing only or both hands? Depending on how this works with your swing timer, it seems to me like it will be anywhere from terrible to ‘meh’. If it messes with your swing timer for both hands while you are hauling 2 big slow 2-handers around, then it could be a pretty awful talent. If the effect on your swing timer is minimal (MH only) that would be better but still only ‘meh’ because it requires a Bloodthirst crit to be activated. So every 6 seconds (Bloodthirst cooldown) you have a ~30% (or whatever your crit % is) chance to get an instant Slam which translate roughly to 3 per minute. Not bad, not great either.

Unending Fury (5 ranks) – Reduces the rage cost of Cleave, Whirlwind and Bloodthirst by 1 (stacks to 5) and gives your Enraged Assault a 6% (stacks to 30%) chance to refresh the cooldown of Bloodthirst. If Titan’s Grip is leaving fury warriors with a lot more rage issues than ever before, then this is pretty nice. But, in TBC, a fury warrior in a proper melee group has more than enough rage to do anything he wants. So this may end up having the same problem as the Bloodthirst change – its nice, but it doesn’t increase damage.

Titan’s Grip – Dual wield 2 handers. This has been reduced to a 1 point talent and the swing speed penalty has been removed. Finally this talent is good. As far as I can tell, this is the most exciting thing that is going to be happening to warriors in the expansion… and it only took 3 tries for Blizzard to make it good

Comments

Blood Craze
6 % won’t be that much, but I guess they chose that value to match DK’s vendetta (which was 6 % at the time). I do hope they will also fix the refresh issue, consecutive crits refresh the timer without letting it tick.

Enrage
Used to be 40% is now 15%, we can safely say that along with Soul Link, this is one of the most nerfed ability that WoW has seen

Death Wish
I really liked DW’s fear immunity, it was awesome in some fights like Nightbane. I do hope they will drop the damage taken increase

Bloodthirst
Given all the other buffs, fury had, I am even suprised the healing part of BT got changed. It’s a good thing, they increased it, I mean 30 HP per hit, what a joke it was.

Furious Attacks
I’m tempted to QQ on this one, as this is an outright steal to arms’s staple PvP talent. Yes fury needed help in the PvP department, did they needed MS to be viable ? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure the dev could have come up with something better than giving them MS to fix them, but well, this seems to be the plaster for every class (MS shot, MS totem, MS Weapons…)

Heroic Leap
Once the targetting issue will be fixed, this talent will definitely rock. It will help fury’s mobility ans also provide them with a small (short duration) AoE CC, given the rage : HL –> Int Shout, now that’s what I call a fear bomb :D

Rampage
Ghostcrawler (a dev) explained that they want to provide interchangeability between classes. For example the Crit Aura from a fury warrior or a feral druid. The attack speed reduction of a warrior or Curse of Weakness. They want to do this in order to have “must have” classes. This is a good change, can’t wait to try it out.

Bloodsurge
Since it gets instant, I think it won’t reset the timer. I haven’t tested it yet though.

Unending Fury
Doesn’t sound very attractive, might be worth a try though

Titan’s Grip
I’m sure this will be proved to be amazingly overpowered once lvl 80 raid gear will appear on the servers. Expect a looooonnnngggg series of nerf of every abilities except TG

call me a tard but i have so much rage i never worry about a swing timer. also the rampage thing is gay i like my AP buff, but LoTP is a ranged buff so it is kind of silly as well, i have be side by side with my citty friend (in his party as well lol) and did not have it. as a hole though from what i have heard from thoughs with batas warrios are getting a nerf for every buff they get, so way to go bliz!

Using a swing timer isn’t about rage consumption, it’s about maximizing your DPS.

Bloodsurge I can confirm that this DOES NOT reset your swing timer. It basically turns your next Slam into an instant attack.

While the healing from Blood Craze and Bloodthirst don’t really sound all that great on the surface, they will allow you to solo quite effectively meaning non stop pulling and killing while leveling. It remains to be seen if it will be useful at all once you hit 80.